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MokBa)
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I haven't gone around to playing BG3 yet since I'm not super into isometric cameras, but it'd have to completely shatter what I expect out of a video game to rate it above TotK. Imo TotK has been so heavily scrutinized that I think it's been pushed down a lot of people's lists or deemed overrated whereas discussion around BG3 seems to have more of a throughline of unexpected greatness. I know a few people IRL who have like 80+ hours on BG3 but either haven't even started or gave up on TotK.
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Dec 8, 2023 20:51
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TOTK owns but at its core it’s just a refined version of BOTW. The building is really neat but it is not nearly as transformative as it could have been. Outside of the designed puzzles and any extracurricular “look I made a cool thing to post on TikTok” it mostly just left me thinking about how cool it would be if the piece limits were less restrictive and stuff didn’t despawn as soon as you walk away from it.
causticBeet fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Dec 8, 2023 |
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Dec 8, 2023 20:54
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TotK is my game of the year, but not at the cost of how much I enjoyed BG3. Both games are different and both are fantastic. I completely understand why BG3 took it for the big funny awards.
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Dec 8, 2023 21:31
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I haven't played BG3 either (I'l wait until it's like $30 or something) but everything I've seen of it looks fantastic. TBF I mostly want to play with the character generation stuff.
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Dec 8, 2023 22:33
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Baldurs Gate totally earned it. TotK would’ve stood a better chance if Breath of the Wild didn’t exist and already won a game of the year. BG3 deserves its flowers, and we need more games like it. 2023 has been a crazy good year for gaming.
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Dec 9, 2023 05:17
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I figured those two were the big contenders, I thought TotK might get it just because it's such a big swing mechanically for the franchise, but I'm not surprised BG took it. I really want to try that one, but I've held off on getting it without a solid discount, which unfortunately might not happen for years. There's just a solid chance I'll bounce off of it based on the presentation style, even if it's a huge advancement in translating the creative D&D experience to a CRPG.
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Dec 9, 2023 05:31
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ChocNitty posted:For those who have played both TOTK and BG3, do you feel BG3 was more deserving of GOTY? The stuff that I found out through exploration and experimentation in BG3 makes the TOTK videos look quaint, and that's just the stuff I figured out on my own. Looking through other videos on "did you know that in BG3, you can..." and it's full of stuff I didn't find. Or couldn't find. Like, a quest reward to a quest you didn't even realize was a quest, with a non-obvious solution to a problem that has much more obvious solutions, and doing these things in Act 1 sets up further payoffs for your choices going all the way into Act 3. And these rewards are sometimes nuts, including items that can fundamentally alter entire playstyles of certain classes and subclasses and permanently reshape how you approach combat for a given character. You can ride the whole game through on surface-level knowledge of the mechanics of the battle system, or you can do deep dives into how certain mechanics interact with each other between equipment, abilities, and feats to make utterly broken multiclass builds that solo boss fights. It's also got full controller support, and every patch seems to refine it a bit more to improve the experience. Where BG3 really dances circles around TOTK is story. The character writing and performances in BG3 are good. The main story leans heavily into the more scifi body horror aspects of D&D instead of its bog-standard fantasy tropes, without losing its sense of charm and levity. You immediately find yourself surrounded by blood, gore, spaceships, demons, and sentient brain monsters, yet it never gets bleak. Everybody that you can recruit for your party is a goddamned delight to get to know, there's always something interesting to learn about them and more than a handful of emotionally touching moments during their stories. That's not to say they're all optimistic do-gooders (there's probably only a couple truly capital-G Good people in the party overall) but they're compelling. You want to learn more about them, hear their story, pursue their goals, help them find their closure. Then you can also play through the game as those party members, and find out even more about their story from their perspective as the protagonist. And I didn't even play the game as the "character" that's widely considered to be the actual main character with some of the best writing in the game (The Dark Urge, which is essentially like being able to custom-create the look of a character while still getting that character's full story as your own instead of making up/roleplaying your own. BG3 also really nails the CRPG experience in a way that I, a non-CRPG-player, could not put down. It's simple to pick up, but every encounter in the game is handcrafted and contains multiple details that make it unique and memorable. I can still picture in my head every fight that I got into during Act I, starting from the first fight on the mothership where I was learning how to work the system, to the bigger fights like the Goblin Camp or the temple in the Underdark, where I understood the game mechanics much, much better but was still hanging on by the seat of my pants as poo poo got wildly out of control. The only reason that I can't say I could do the same in Act 2 or Act 3 is the more open areas seem like they got larger and larger from act to act. Act 3 left me gobsmacked with how I could walk into a map, play for 5 or 6 hours, and then find myself barely reaching the halfway point of the map being explored. One map! Like at the end of the day we're still comparing two very strong contenders for GOTY, TOTK definitely excels in areas that BG3 isn't trying to compete in (and vice versa), but BG3 had a staggering amount of love and care go into every minute detail of the game, and they have continued putting out patch after patch to improve the experience for their playerbase, and I wouldn't be surprised if we got an actual, honest-to-goodness Expansion Pack as DLC some years down the road. BG3 is one of those games that's a passion project of an indie studio that's been trying to make the drat thing happen for a decade, and it really, really shows. I ended up putting over 150 hours in and the only reason I haven't put another 150 in was because the inventory management needed some patches and/or mods, and the latest patch just addressed it!  e: Like, I'm a lifelong Zelda fan who grew up on OOT and LTTP, MM may be my favorite of all time, BOTW was easily my GOTY contender in 2017 and TOTK would easily be my GOTY pick in 2023. I'd bounced off other CRPG games in the past, including the other big one made by Larian, never played a BG game before, and BG3 is by far my GOTY pick bawk fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Dec 9, 2023 |
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Dec 9, 2023 06:34
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causticBeet posted:TOTK owns but at its core it’s just a refined version of BOTW. The building is really neat but it is not nearly as transformative as it could have been. Outside of the designed puzzles and any extracurricular “look I made a cool thing to post on TikTok” it mostly just left me thinking about how cool it would be if the piece limits were less restrictive and stuff didn’t despawn as soon as you walk away from it. This was it for me. TotK's design philosophy struck me as very strange - they give you all these incredible tools and a wide open world, but you're constantly running into engine and arbitrary balance limitations. I can't help but imagine what the game could be had they added an explorer mode. BG3 otoh encourages you to push the boundaries of the game. Hell, the official twitter account loves sharing broken combos people create instead of patching them out of the game: https://twitter.com/larianstudios/status/1691751653941350519?t=0CNVs43Wyl-eCymaMd0IUA AfricanBootyShine fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Dec 9, 2023 |
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Dec 9, 2023 12:01
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I really doubt the limitations of TotK's engine are arbitrary. it's amazing it works at all sometimes, let alone as well as it does
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Dec 9, 2023 12:16
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Martman posted:I really doubt the limitations of TotK's engine are arbitrary. it's amazing it works at all sometimes, let alone as well as it does Especially on the Switch's hardware.
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Dec 9, 2023 13:05
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The engine limitations are understandable, what I said felt arbitrary were the limitations set in the name of balance.
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Dec 9, 2023 13:20
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I tried playing through Baldurs Gate 1 a long rear end time ago when it came out and bounced off hard. I’m definitely interested in getting 3 though, I’m a much different gamer now than I was back then. I’ll probably wait for an expansion or the inevitable GOTY edition. I have no issues with it taking GOTY and agree with the other posters who feel TOTK probably shouldn’t earn it due to how close it is to BOTW which previously won it. Yeah 2023 was an amazing year for games, probably won’t be one like it for a while. Things are gonna be bad soon enough with all these industry layoffs and consolidation.
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Dec 9, 2023 13:43
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broken pixel posted:TotK is my game of the year, but not at the cost of how much I enjoyed BG3. Both games are different and both are fantastic. I completely understand why BG3 took it for the big funny awards. Yeah, I loved BG3 but Tears of the Kingdom was my Game of the Year (go post a Top 10 in the Game of the Year thread, people!), but that's not in any way an indictment of BG3, they're very different games but each an incredible experience. TotK nailed it for me on the strength of the finish, which I think was a masterclass in simplicity used for a near perfect emotional climax.
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Dec 9, 2023 13:58
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AfricanBootyShine posted:The engine limitations are understandable, what I said felt arbitrary were the limitations set in the name of balance.
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Dec 9, 2023 14:28
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That's what the rockets are for.
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Dec 9, 2023 15:13
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Slugworth posted:The range on ultra hand is maddening. Want to bring the vehicle you made up a very small cliff that's in your way? Unacceptable. Probably done as a combination of gameplay balance and bug prevention. I’m sure a massive 25 object creation stressed the engine when you extended it out really far. Also this: Kassad posted:That's what the rockets are for.
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Dec 9, 2023 15:46
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What? Your cars don't cling to vertical cliffs using two stolen propellers attached to a series of wagon wheels, flux construct II cores and intricately linked woven big wheels?
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Dec 9, 2023 17:48
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Totk doesn’t suffer from engine limitations. 99.99% of people aren’t going to build a more than than 50 piece build (or ten piece for that matter). It suffers from there being no point in making anything but the most basic construct. The 3 piece hoverbike is far more effective than any Wacky Racers car you could ever make, and walking and climbing is more convenient too.
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Dec 9, 2023 21:56
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galagazombie posted:Totk doesn’t suffer from engine limitations. 99.99% of people aren’t going to build a more than than 50 piece build (or ten piece for that matter). It suffers from there being no point in making anything but the most basic construct. The 3 piece hoverbike is far more effective than any Wacky Racers car you could ever make, and walking and climbing is more convenient too. The best machines all involve war crimes imo.
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Dec 9, 2023 22:11
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GATOS Y VATOS posted:The best machines all involve war crimes imo. Committing war crimes just takes way too much effort though. I’m not going to spend an hour of my life creating a torture machine to kill some random squad of bokoblins guarding a chest with one ruby in it.
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Dec 9, 2023 23:08
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galagazombie posted:Committing war crimes just takes way too much effort though. I’m not going to spend an hour of my life creating a torture machine to kill some random squad of bokoblins guarding a chest with one ruby in it. I hear you, but at the same time it really shows how ToTK is incredibly versatile to allow play in many ways.
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Dec 9, 2023 23:19
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galagazombie posted:Committing war crimes just takes way too much effort though. I’m not going to spend an hour of my life creating a torture machine to kill some random squad of bokoblins guarding a chest with one ruby in it.
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Dec 9, 2023 23:21
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The incentive for building wacky machines in tears of the kingdom is Internet clout and making yourself laugh
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Dec 9, 2023 23:26
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galagazombie posted:It suffers from there being no point in making anything but the most basic construct. The point is having fun! You can have lots of fun with the basic constructs too, but I love that the game gives you the option to experiment and play with trying out different things if you want to and having it actually work/be possible.
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Dec 9, 2023 23:55
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Sometimes making simpler constructs is good for Internet clout and laughs as well. There is a cleverness in being able to create a machine that does the same work with less pieces than other people can figure out
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Dec 10, 2023 00:01
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Cheesus posted:Let me tell you autobuild... Sure if you want to replace “an hour building” with “an hour farming zoanite”. Auto build is just too expensive for anything besides the three or four simple constructs (the hoverbike, fan glider that doubles as a car, boat, and fan sled) that outdo all the others. I only really used auto build for things like that and was still running low on zoanite by the end. That was basically my impetus to go ahead and beat ganon and stop playing, basically “I’ve finished all the shrines and temples, like hell I’m going to play mining simulator 2023 to keep playing.”
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Dec 10, 2023 00:56
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I greatly cherished my army of murderbots and horribly inefficient travel aids and deployed them all the time, it does help that you can make really efficient killing machines for <20 zonaite without donated parts. My big constructions didn't cost much more than that either but mostly because I always had a couple dozen of every part sitting around and I made a conscious decision with this game to use whatever I got and not save anything for later. Smartest choice I made in retrospect, because as soon as I started fusing everything to whatever seemed interesting, things got a lot easier. Does help that I never got tired of dropping down to annihilate a bunch of depths bosses because spin2win literally never got old, and every one of them goes down in seconds if you're fine with cheese. The Biggoron Sword has insane durability that's only boosted with fusion, it's incredible value for souls and became my go-to. Next playthrough I'll be doing Zora weapons now that the frogsuit secrets are revealed to me.
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Dec 10, 2023 01:15
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Jerusalem posted:The point is having fun! You can have lots of fun with the basic constructs too, but I love that the game gives you the option to experiment and play with trying out different things if you want to and having it actually work/be possible. Yeah. The fact that building crazy poo poo is not necessary or optimal is fine. Good even. I don’t love that aspect of the game so I’m glad I didn’t have to spend half my time on it. But some people clearly adore it and I am happy for them that they get to build literal loving Godzilla if they want. It’s ok for a game system to be fun but optional
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Dec 10, 2023 02:18
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bawk posted:e: Like, I'm a lifelong Zelda fan who grew up on OOT and LTTP, MM may be my favorite of all time, BOTW was easily my GOTY contender in 2017 and TOTK would easily be my GOTY pick in 2023. I'd bounced off other CRPG games in the past, including the other big one made by Larian, never played a BG game before, and BG3 is by far my GOTY pick Thank you for the thorough and thoughtful reply. I was so sure TOTK would get GOTY. But even people in the Zelda reddit subs are saying BG3 deserved it, so it must be awesome. I've just never been able to get into turn based strategy rpg's before. But with some help, I think i'll be able to grasp it.
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Dec 10, 2023 02:31
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galagazombie posted:Sure if you want to replace “an hour building” with “an hour farming zoanite”. Auto build is just too expensive for anything besides the three or four simple constructs (the hoverbike, fan glider that doubles as a car, boat, and fan sled) that outdo all the others. I only really used auto build for things like that and was still running low on zoanite by the end. That was basically my impetus to go ahead and beat ganon and stop playing, basically “I’ve finished all the shrines and temples, like hell I’m going to play mining simulator 2023 to keep playing.” If you have the materials for building, you can use Autobuild to assemble them for you without spending any zonaite. Just gather your supplies and or/open up any gacha capsules you'll need ahead of time and the game will automatically add whatever falls inside the purple area of effect to the final construct.
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Dec 10, 2023 09:00
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Lord Hawking posted:If you have the materials for building, you can use Autobuild to assemble them for you without spending any zonaite. Just gather your supplies and or/open up any gacha capsules you'll need ahead of time and the game will automatically add whatever falls inside the purple area of effect to the final construct. Yes but playing gatcha takes from that same resource pool so you never really escape the conundrum of “Do I want to play the game or do I want to do busywork to allow me to play the game?”
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Dec 10, 2023 09:16
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It would be cool if you could build a zonaite-mining device that generates passive zonaite income based on how well you design it
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Dec 10, 2023 09:25
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galagazombie posted:Yes but playing gatcha takes from that same resource pool so you never really escape the conundrum of “Do I want to play the game or do I want to do busywork to allow me to play the game?” Only if you throw the rocks in, which I've only done once to test it out. You probably shouldn't be.
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Dec 10, 2023 10:29
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galagazombie posted:Yes but playing gatcha takes from that same resource pool so you never really escape the conundrum of “Do I want to play the game or do I want to do busywork to allow me to play the game?” What are you talking about? Defeated constructs drop small zonai charges. Those are only good for two things: recharging your power cells and throwing into the gachas for devices. Every time I find a gacha, I throw 5 small charges in, and I get like 20 device capsules out of the machine. 5 large charges literally fill up the capsule output area of the gatcha, but those are more rare, so I don't really use them much. I've never dipped below 100 small charges in my inventory, and I'm swimming in spare devices. I've never used zonaite to buy a zonai charge, and I never will. Unneeded resource hoarding aside, this whole point is rendered moot, because the game's all about doing things your way. If you think this system is tedious and annoying, then you are free to engage with a more appealing system instead. You absolutely don't need to use autobuild for everything. Hell, the only time I ever felt a "need" to even use zonai devices was when I spent a play session just cruising along between sky islands. I spent about 27 zonaite auto-building fan gliders to get from island to island, and only used that much because the bikes would despawn after like half an hour of use or something. They're there as an option, and clever use of them can really break the game over your knee if you want to trivialize some particular situation or another.
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Dec 10, 2023 15:30
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The thing that really got me about ToTK builds is that the strong enemies could just roar at them and vaporize them. Like, I’d love to sit around and dream up a tank that can fight a dragon, but it just erases constructs in a single move. So do the lynels. I think discovering that was the only time I really got mad at the game.
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Dec 10, 2023 16:56
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Akratic Method posted:The thing that really got me about ToTK builds is that the strong enemies could just roar at them and vaporize them. Like, I’d love to sit around and dream up a tank that can fight a dragon, but it just erases constructs in a single move. So do the lynels. I think discovering that was the only time I really got mad at the game. Yeah, I agree that that's kinda bullshit, but I also see how if it weren't for that, then there'd basically be no reason to put yourself in danger around those enemies. I feel like that sort of situation would be less annoying if like, the parts all had some kinda hidden HP pool, and could be broken via direct attacks, instead of just being insta-popped by a roar. That way, it'd become more of a game of controlling aggro, trying to make sure the lynel is focused on you while your laser gatling gun or whatever whittles it down safely.
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Dec 10, 2023 17:03
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The monsters that can roar away constructs are the only monsters I'm really interested in using constructs to fight.
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Dec 10, 2023 17:24
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YggiDee posted:The monsters that can roar away constructs are the only monsters I'm really interested in using constructs to fight.
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Dec 10, 2023 17:33
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I found hover stones to be the magic ingredient for that problem. Until the mention of "roars" above I didn't fully connect what they were doing (other than hitting my build) before I activated and raised it. One raised it was my path to kill Lynels, Gleeoks, and Ganon's Army. Just the other day, after going back to SMRPG bosses and being a little miffed that refighting Smyth just ended the game again, I went back to TOTK to see how much difficulty I would have, not touching it since finishing in early October. I started out trying to do the flying stabilizer trick but couldn't figure it out . Then I went back to my save starting at Ganon's Army, and popping out my autobuild platform, I was able to finish the game again just as quickly.
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Dec 10, 2023 18:38
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| # ? Jun 5, 2024 07:41 |
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Akratic Method posted:The thing that really got me about ToTK builds is that the strong enemies could just roar at them and vaporize them. Like, I’d love to sit around and dream up a tank that can fight a dragon, but it just erases constructs in a single move. So do the lynels. I think discovering that was the only time I really got mad at the game. Yeah lol, this was the thing that made me completely stop caring about trying to make neat tools. I spent like an hour building and testing an autobuild template for a Gleeok fighting contraption, and then when I took it into battle it just immediately got vaporized, which I didn't even know could happen.
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Dec 10, 2023 18:48
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